


Made to Be Broken

by poisontaster



Series: Heart 'Verse [30]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Mental Health Issues, POV Outsider, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-07
Updated: 2006-09-07
Packaged: 2018-05-17 17:00:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5878585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn't know what she's looking for. She only knows that when she looks, it doesn't hurt quite so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Made to Be Broken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aesvir](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=aesvir).



> aesvir made an idle comment in The Chains of Babylon about the survivors of the Asher's Grove tragedy and thus little plot bunnies are born. Familiarity with that story is really sort of key.

I.

They let her out on a Tuesday.

Appropriately, it was gray and rainy and cold, but it was real and the first rain she'd been able to just stand in and _be_ and get wet in nearly a decade so she just upturned her face and let it sluice over her like it could wash something away or maybe wash something in.

They let her out on a Tuesday with a handful of papers, a room rented for her in a local church-run halfway house and an appointment for a day program. She could have taken the bus—they gave her one of those strange celluloid pre-paid cards—but the thought of being enclosed with all those strangers, looking at her, _seeing_ her, fills her with horror that makes her want to vomit.

So she walks. Her sensible skirt and sweater are plastered to her skin by the time she gets there and her shins ache, because she hasn't walked any distance in almost a decade either. The matron looks at her suspiciously and checks her name against the list three times before grudgingly edging aside just enough for her to slither past.

She doesn't know what to do now. In her bag she has a collection of newspaper articles, as many as she could find or collect with the doctors looking over her shoulder. The new doctor, Merope, has started encouraging her, thinking it will somehow assist in her recovery. He gave her a book of blank pages and a pot of child's glue to put them in some kind of order but she likes them loose, like leaves that she can trickle over her skin.

Asher's Grove. It's nothing but a ghost town now, the few unaffected by whatever malaise drove three-fourths of its population insane scattered hastily to the winds. She supposes they were the lucky ones.

II.

The thing is, she doesn't feel insane.

After her years in the hospital, she understands that this is common, that truly crazy people never suspect their own craziness, but the feeling persists. She feels empty, she feels hollowed out, like something in her is missing and has been ever since…

Ever since.

And that's the other part of it. She doesn't know.

She remembers her childhood, rendered in shades of dawn-pink and sunlit yellow. She remembers her father, mother, brothers Jon and Jacob. She remembers school, years whether she was neither popular nor reviled, going by in a kind of quiet obscurity. She remembers getting a job in the diner, the ugly red and gingham of her too big dress. And then it fades. There is only darkness and hunger—always the hunger—and the echoes of screams. She doesn't know if they're hers or someone else's. Most of the time, she thinks she's better not knowing.

And then her next clear memory is standing in the snow, one arm useless and dripping blood in fat droplets of crimson, shocking against the white. Below her, the asylum—Arcadia—is burning.

And eventually, men came. Not men from the town but Others; ones who talked to her in soft soothing voices as they hoisted her up into the ambulance, as they pulled the bullet from her shoulder, as they inserted the needle into her veins that will make her dull and stupid for days at a time.

And then the hospital.

They say she's better. She thinks she just learned to shut up about things they don't want to hear. Which…is maybe the same thing.

In the beginning, she hoped the hole in her would heal like her damaged shoulder—maybe never quite right again (she tends to drop things, her grip weak and unreliable)—but more or less okay. But instead the emptiness remains, a hunger she cannot satisfy no matter how hard she tries.

There are others like her. Some of the names she remembers, some of them are merely "a one-time resident of the defunct town of Asher's Grove", but in addition to the clippings of the catastrophe itself she has the articles of suicides and overdoses, failed attempts to be alive, to be real to be _whole_.

She's never really tried. She wonders if that makes her smart or just a coward.

III.

After about a week of it—getting up, getting around, going through the motions—she puts all her clippings and pictures in the pockets of her cardigan (they're the only things that really _matter_ ) and walks out to the highway.

She sticks out her thumb and it's not too long before someone stops to help her. He's a nice man, overweight and sweating, his gold wedding band cutting into his flesh. He cautions her about the dangers of hitchhiking and gives her the sandwich and banana from the lunch his wife made him that morning. He drops her off twenty miles down the road with a sad, tight smile and waves as he pulls away.

She doesn't know where she's going. Not really. She only knows that she needs to go, needs to _move_ after so many years of enforced stillness.

She's not mad at the doctors. How can she be? If it had been anyone else, if it hadn't been _her_ , she wouldn't believe either. Her time in the hospital has taught her of the layers that exist, almost invisible, separating her from the world of the sane, the rational, the "real". They have a secret language, the mad, and even those who are not mad in the traditional sense can learn it when they've been touched by madness.

She's heard things. They all have. And as she takes to the road she hears more, passing unseen and ignored by those not her kind, shadow-people, living ghosts. She exists hand-to-mouth, on sufferance, on charity, on greed. Sometimes they want to fuck her, the men that give her rides, and she lets them because that too has ceased to matter very much. Sometimes they only want to take her memories, some small piece of herself, asking questions, asking her to recount her scant memories for their entertainment. And she does that too because a hollowed shell has nothing left to lose.

She doesn't know what she's looking for. She only knows that when she looks, it doesn't hurt quite so much.

IV.

She finds them on a Friday.

Eventually, on a Friday afternoon, she finds herself at the bottom of a gravel driveway, curving towards a house that can only be guessed by its eaves, sticking up above the tree line. There is no name painted on the mailbox, only a number. There is nothing to tell her _you have arrived_. And yet she knows she has.

Her feet drag and slur over the small stones. Her shoes are old now and the soles worn to the consistency of tissue; it feels like every one of them imprints itself on her skin, marking this moment, marking her.

The house is a big one, set off to the side around a large yard and a number of outbuildings. Her legs feel heavy, leaden, as she drags herself up the steps. _I will do this,_ she thinks. _I can._

Her first knock is too soft; no one can hear her, she's sure. It's only on second look that she sees the doorbell and she could kick herself. _Stupid_ , she thinks and presses the buzzer. Chimes go off, echoing deep within the belly of the house and she shivers.

The girl that comes to the door is maybe fourteen, with a sweet, pretty face and hard, dangerous eyes. "Yes?"

She shivers again, afraid and cold. The hole at the center of her gnaws with icy teeth and it feels like nothing will ever fill it again.

"I…" She's not used to the sound of her voice—her voice—and not the doll-baby recording she puts on for the doctors, for the men and their cars, for the kind-faced grandmothers who pressed avocadoes and corncobs on sticks into her hands. All at once, she realizes she doesn't even know their names. It never occurred to her that anyone else would be here. "Are they home?"

"Oh." The girl looks unsurprised. Something in her eyes changes and though she still looks dangerous she doesn't seem as _immediate_ in her danger. "Yeah. I mean, yes. Come in."

She sways on the doorstep, afraid to cross the threshold now that she's here. She doesn't even know why she's come.

The girl looks at her. "It's all right," she says, more kindly. "It's okay. Seriously. Come on in."

V.

She comes into the foyer and a man is walking crookedly down the steps. He is many years older than she remembers and one-eyed now but after dreaming his face for so long, she thinks she'd know it anywhere and relief fills her, rushing inside her like wind and tide.

She looks up at him. "I came…" She swallows. "I'm from Asher's Grove," she says, amazed at the sound of her own voice, loud and clear.

"Dean!" The girl swears and leaps up the stairs to catch him as the cane clatters out of the man's hands and he nearly falls down the steps.


End file.
